Bioethics is a nascent discipline in South Africa and in Africa in general, and the teaching of bioethics remains largely unaddressed in the majority of Africa's medical schools. As a result, researchers and both professional and lay members of institutional review boards are poorly trained in the basic concepts of bioethics. This leaves many patients and animals in Africa vulnerable to exploitation by medical research. The South African Research Ethics Training Initiative (SARETI) plans to address this in a multi-disciplinary, multi-center, national co-operative effort by three key and numerous other role players. The University of Pretoria with its Faculty of Medicine, School of Health Systems and Public Health, and its Law Faculty which includes the Centre for Human Rights, proposes to form a consortium with the University of South Africa's Law Faculty, the University of Natal's School of Psychology and its Unilever Centre for Comparative and Applied Ethics, and the Africa Centre for Population Studies and Reproductive Health (a Wellcome Trust funded centre associated with the University of Natal) to provide innovative training in health research ethics for the sub-Saharan region of Africa. The main educational component of this program focuses on a modular Master's degree in research ethics in which the modules will also be used as "stand alone" courses for researchers and IRB members who do not have the time to attend full-time for a Master's degree, and as a "diploma" course which does not carry a dissertation requirement. A second, but equally important, component is the creation of opportunities for South African staff in the collaborating institutions to advance their own training in research ethics, centered around the modules they teach. The smaller components of the program include: annual meetings of advisory board, quarterly meetings of the collaborating staff, arranging an annual research ethics symposium for the sub- Saharan region in Africa, and, in the last two years, producing 6 modules on compact disc and on the web-sites of the participating institutions.